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crimeandpunishment writes "This real-life clash of the titans could be much more interesting than the movie. Today Google fired the latest volley in its war of words with Apple over mobile advertising. In a blog posting, the head of Google's mobile ad service, Admob, had harsh words for Apple's new restrictions concerning the iPhone and iPad ... calling them a threat to competition. There's a lot of money at stake ... the US mobile ad market, which is about $600 million, is expected to more than double by 2013."

One of the reasons Android is an important project for Google -- it makes them little, if any, money, despite a half-baked plan to sell their own handset -- is exactly this scenario. Google's fear was that a single vendor would have too much control to cut them out. So Android was birthed, and there are many vendors. And for those who might not know, any Android handset vendor has the full ability to replace Google with Bing, or to cut out Google ads in other forms, yet the "fragmentation" of the market ensures that there isn't an overly one-sided power distribution.

So is Apple being testy because of Android....or is this the gameplan all along, and Android was a good pre-emptive strike?

So Google gets into smartphones, browsers and operating systems, and then cries "Foul!" when Apple gets into online advertising? (OK, I know Apple's hardware restrictions are a valid issue, but still....)

I mean it's not exactly startling that your direct competition doesn't want you advertising on their device.

So when you buy an iPhone, you accept that it's still Steve's? Wow.

Note that we're talking about ads in third-party applications. Meaning as a third-party application developer, Apple has now said "Oh, and by the way if you want to advertise, your only real choice is us." How is that defensible?

And do you accept that the Safari browser on the iOS devices has the right to purge all web ads and replace them with Apple ads? Why not, right?

How are they supposed to know how much to charge or how much to pay out if they aren't legally permitted to know how many users are being exposed to ads, how long the exposure is, what click-through/tap-through rates are, etc?

What Apple has done is not explicitly ban third party advertisers, but instead achieve that goal through crafty wording in their developer agreement.

So Google gets into smartphones, browsers and operating systems, and then cries "Foul!" when Apple gets into online advertising? (OK, I know Apple's hardware restrictions are a valid issue, but still....)

Google is crying foul not because Apple got into advertising, but because Apple banned companies owned by makers of other mobile operating systems from using analytics(critical for ads) on the iDevices. i.e Apple is specifically targeting Google just like it targeted Adobe last time around

Apple's excuse is, they want to protect their customers privacy. In fact they treat them like 6 year olds but it isn't the issue, it is their excuse.

Google, still thinking entire planet thinks they are "good guys" has major problems with their corporate culture and actions based on that. From "updater" to "Google Chrome" with default settings, Google is always blamed (rightfully) for not respecting users privacy. Some already calls them private data leeching vampires.

Steve Jobs saw this coming and used "privacy" as excuse to lock down the "real" advertising (location/analytics) to their own network. Now Google pops up and complains, people will say to them "look to mirror".

Some panel of advertisers or some people from analytics community should be speaking, not them. Anyway, too late now.

I don't quite see how less than 10% of the smartphone market, let alone the complete cellphone market, constitutes a monopoly. Sure, they have a monopoly on iPhones and Apple's iOS, but the same can be said of almost all cellular companies and their hardware/OS combinations.

Uh, no. Google is crying "Foul!" because Apple is banning developers from using Google's ad platform in their apps. Conveniently, right at the same time as they introduce their own: iAd. Yes, ads suck and it's weird defending an advertising platform, but this is Google: the company that made ads useful and unoffensive (and just that slight bit creepy).

Cable and satellite providers are the content distribution services. Of course they have a right to decide who advertises on their networks.
If Sony told cable and satellite providers that they weren't aloud to analyse what stations users were watching on their Sony TV, while Sony was at the same time polling all this information for themselves and feeding ad's to the sets, you'd be singing a different song.

Google should play hardball by creating more non-ad material (of high value to apple users), and displaying it in the same way the adds are displayed. Thus if the appleans want to consume it they will need to turn off the ad blocker, or switch to andriod.
Be imaginative you only have one chance at suicide.

In fairness, Google elected to compete with Apple in the mobile space with Android, the desktop space with the Google OS, and with a web browser (based on a technology currently largely driven by Apple no less). Then, when Apple tried to buy AdMob Google pulled the stool from under the deal.

If you were Apple (which is to say Steve Jobs) would you not be rather pissed? I certainly would be. If I had a legal recourse to retaliate in a business context I almost certainly would.

You've got to hand it to Apple they played this one really well. The FTC just approved of the Google/AdMod deal on the strength of Apple competition and so Apple feels pretty confident they can compete aggressively with little chance of the government crying foul.

So is Apple being testy because of Android....or is this the gameplan all along, and Android was a good pre-emptive strike?

I don't think so. Google was one of the most important partners when the iPhone got its start: Google search, Maps, Youtube it was all on there. Then they decided they wanted a piece of the pie instead of depending on Apple and started directly competing with them making inane jabs in the process comparing Apple to North Korea [nytimes.com] and targeting them in their presentations [huffingtonpost.com]. Don't start a fight if you can't take a punch.

You're missing the point, for many apps you will have the option of either purchasing a full price version or running an ad supported version so you can have exactly that choice. There will of course be paid apps with ads included but those most likely will either be unpopular or will be imitated by apps with the either/or model.

And do you accept that the Safari browser on the iOS devices has the right to purge all web ads and replace them with Apple ads? Why not, right?

Your actually very astute by pointing this out. The application advertising is only the first skirmish in the battle. Apple will almost certainly permit these ads to be shown in Safari using some kind of proprietary extension. Because iAD adds earn significantly more than AdSense these will get extensive adoption and significantly improve support for iOS devices.

> Some already calls them private data leeching vampires.Generally just people who have an entirely different grudge with google, usually something along the lines of sour grapes that google doesn't let them unfairly twist the search/ad results in their favor.

> Steve Jobs saw this coming and used "privacy" as excuse to lock down the "real" advertising (location/analytics) to their own network. Now Google pops up and complains, people will say to them "look to mirror".

Steve wants to own his cake and eat it too. First apple makes the hardware, which it owns. Oh, but you can install third party apps! But only through the store which apple owns and controls. Oh, but it's also a communication device, it has web access! But apple controls what aspects of the web you're allowed to use. Apple and Google are on the extreme opposite ends of the lock-in control freak scale. Google may want a finger in every pie, but they don't prevent any other company from entering any layer of the market at any time.

The suggestion that Apple is denying a given right is absurd. I've made an app, and I could fill it full of ads for Joe's Curry House or even Google if I chose. But I don't, because that would be stupid and ruin the app - instead I make a good app.

And let's not forget, the company that is most aggressively targeting Apple's business is Google. Why on earth would they a) help them and b) do it in a way that means that their customers get bombarded with mindless ads about 'secret tips to remove tummy fat'.

The mac fanatics will just say the usual:"but Apple isn't in a monopoly on the phone market!"

And hence they can't do anything wrong and you will be moderated troll.

monopoly |mnäpl|noun ( pl. -lies)1 the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service : his likely motive was to protect his regional monopoly on furs.
[usu. with negative ] the exclusive possession, control, or exercise of something : men don't have a monopoly on unrequited love.
a company or group having exclusive control over a commodity or service : areas where cable companies operate as monopolies.
a commodity or service controlled in this way : electricity, gas, and water were considered to be natural monopolies.2 ( Monopoly) trademark a board game in which players engage in simulated property and financial dealings using imitation money. It was invented in the U.S. and the name was coined by Charles Darrow c. 1935.

Having a monopoly on GOOD phones does not actually count as a real monopoly. Not having a monopoly doesn't mean your actions aren't bad, or even not anticompetitive, but it means they don't have a monopoly.

Yeah, exactly. The whole PC market was built on choice and freedom. Apple has always been about living in the Apple box, and getting some benefits like easier setup at the expense of being in a monoculture..

Although Apple has made some innovations, mainly on the design side, a lot of their innovations fail as well (Firewire?).. The PC has done far more to improve productivity, and the business of computers. If you're in the computer business, you owe it to the PC. Whereas if Apple had won, we would all be working for Apple.

Microsoft, for it's evil, was always just a publishing company. Apple is the tool of the publishing companies. They want to do away with the web, and replace it with a big "App Store". They don't want you to get stuff for free on the web any more. Anyway, the bottom line is that Apple is still swimming upstream. I'm surprised they made as much money with the iPod as they did, but I think that had as much to do with the economic bubble as it did the product. People with a extra money buy nice things, and Apple makes nice things. But not everyone can drive a Porsche, and that will be their eventual undoing, again.

I said a few months ago that APPL was a classic bubble, and the stock will never get over $275 and it still hasn't. People are getting tired of it, the novelty is wearing off, and they just want a cheap phone that does what they want it to do. I think the phone manufacturers have gotten the message and now it's up to the carriers to provide as much bandwidth as possible. Android and Windows Mobile are the long tail and RIM will continue to be the choice of the enterprise professional.

Why should a company help its competition? Why should Apple allow Google to spy on its customers and their platform when Google closely guards their advertising platform and doesn't allow 3rd party ad networks anywhere on their search properties?

If a Ford makes a truck, do they have to allow GM to have a compatible engine for it?

This is not only against google, google is the biggest target, but they hit Microsoft Yahoo and others as well, and also the developers who now have one and only one ad vendor which can provide them the revenue for their free versions, which means they are at the merits of Big Brother to give them a decent share.Which in the long run will not happen, Apple will take more and more of that share since there is no competition.

*IF* you bothered to look, you'll see that while it is googles own advertising platform on all of their products, they DO display ads from 3rd party networks,
In my adsense account, i even have an option to allow 3rd party ads via the google network, (my account -> account settings -> "Third Party Ads Preference" for reference).
Been able to show 3rd party ads on my own website via google's own network defeates alot of what people are saying here.
In *my* website i get to choose my ad provider if i want one. In my iphone app, i have to use apple's ad network, i built the app, why should i be restricted to apples own software/property for how to monitize it? locking out analytics for 3rd parties makes them useless, i'm not going to want to show ads about uk tv shows to american visitors and vice versa, this means any ads showen will be poorly targeted because of this, and the income per click is going to be extremely low.

Quote:"If a Ford makes a truck, do they have to allow GM to have a compatible engine for it?"

Yes they do. If I buy the truck there is nothing that Ford can do if I install a GM engine in it.

And I search for "advertiser networks" in google I do in fact get advertising from a a company which describe them self as"Over 900 successful bloggers use BuySellAds.com to power their online ad sales. We help you sell ads better. We make your life easier."

But that is a bad example anyway, because there is an difference between a website you own, and a device you sell. I would not expect Apple to allow anyone to show advertising on their website or in Apples software, but neither would I expect Apple to have any control over what advertising 3 party software shows on devices once Apple have sold them(The device).

Sure, they have a monopoly on iPhones and Apple's iOS, but the same can be said of almost all cellular companies and their hardware/OS combinations.

You can have a monopoly in a certain market, but not in a certain brand or product name. Saying that Apple has a monopoly on Apple products is the same as saying that Toyota has a monopoly on the Toyota Prius, or Coca Cola Company having a monopoly on the Coca Cola drink.

You can't reasonably run ads without analytics. The entire ad industry depends upon analytics.

And this is mostly Google now. AdMob was the largest of them all and now that Google bought them...

The main reason I don't like Android is Google: With it Google gets your email, your contacts, your searches, your calendar, your location, the maps you look at, the places you navigate to, the RSS-feeds you read, your voice profile and of course they track you via ads. Probably even more things I forgot right now. This is creepy. This is much too much data to give to *one* company that can easily connect all the dots and knows more about you than yourself then. Evil or not evil, this is too much.

I'm totally surprised that people are being that ignorant of the fact that Google is inserting its tentacles in every orifice of your digital existence while whispering "It won't hurt... no, it will feel good and it's totally free" and people are crying for more. Right, you just have to give them your digital soul and your digital blood, nothing more.

Apple is with no doubt just protecting its assets with this, but it's their right and Apple users should be happy about it anyway. This new war between Apple and Google is a most effective firewall between them: Apple won't share your data with Google and Google won't share theirs with Apple.

The "cloud" means you have to give more and more of your personal data to some company; giving different data dimensions to different companies being at war with each other is the least you can do.

I never thought i would say this but darn it, we are lucky Apple didnt win against Microsoft. Apple will if given enough market share make Microsoft look pretty tame.

Steve seems intent on using any leverage against competitors no matter how bad the outcome is for the customers. Microsoft does this too but not at this level, probably because of antitrust concerns.

Apple seemed like a nice company but recent moves has changed that perception almost completely. If given the opportunity they will be just as bad for computing in general as Microsoft has been for the last 20 years.

Steve Jobs are a huge douchebag and the best we can hope for is cooperation between Apple and Microsoft. That way they can stab each others back instead of ruining computing for the rest of us.

Talk about the a false equivalency. Google owns their web site and search results. Apple doesn't own the mobile apps in the app store, at least until they change the developer agreement to say they do.
A real equivalent would be if Google said that anyone who wanted to show up in their search results had to use AdSense or they were banned from the index. People would be outraged, and rightly so. The FTC/DOJ would come down them very hard if they ever tried anything like that.

So what you're saying is that Google makes no money from Android but rather uses it as a tool to gain advantage in the mobile advertising market? Android is not a legitimate mobile phone software business but rather a way to leverage Google's Web ad monopoly into mobile ads? I don't think you're helping Google by telling the truth about them. Just say they are "open" in spite of their black box ads and Android and Chrome OS both having closed native C API's and remind us again that they're not evil. Because when you're not evil, you really need people to remind everybody that you're not evil. Right?

Also, try to ignore the fact that if Google didn't have Android, they wouldn't be locked out of iOS. Because it really fucks up your whole argument.

(a) How does the language of the native API on platform X have anything to do with its "openness"? Yes iOS is objective-C and Android is Java. Openness has everything to do with what you exclude. Anyone is free to deploy a C program to Android, using a C-to-Java-bytecode interpreter for example. The converse is not true for the iPhone, where Java in any form is strictly disallowed.

(b) How can you make statements about Chrome OS, when it isn't even released? Do you have spies inside Google?

(c) Where did Google claim that "Adobe Flash is open"? Either come up with a citation, or admit you're just making shit up.

(d) It was the Manhattan Project that destroyed the PhD brand, if anything the tech companies collectively are restoring it.

If Company-A has 28% market share, Company-B 14% and all the other competitors each have small shares of that magnitude, Company-A has an effective monopoly because it can unduly influence suppliers and purchasers.

The issue is not Apple leverage. The issue is Google leverage. Google is the one who wants to both receive ad data from iPhone users and compete with iPhone at the same time. Apple is saying "pick one." If you're a competitor you don't get the keys to the kingdom so you have an anti-competitive advantage over us.

Of coarse that doesn't make a ban on Google's advertisements OK. But the article says Google's ads themselves are not being banned, just the collection of personal data under certain circumstances. The article itself doesn't say that Apple is collecting the kind of data it is preventing Google from collecting. If Apple isn't collecting that data then it doesn't gain a competitive advantage by banning Google's data collection, it just levels the playing field while allowing Apple to protect user's privacy.

You're making perfect sense, but you have to understand that Toyota does not allow Google to put ads all over every Prius and track the location and store information about every Prius driver and therefore Toyota is a monopoly.
But Toyota can't stop Google putting an advert on a Prius, maybe not in the Toyota factory but once it leaves the factory it can.

Am I missing something on the privacy front, here? You say "The main block Apple has put up is that user location can't be given out to advertisers outside of the iAd system [...] I have location awareness turned off so this doesn't really apply much to me, but the idea is the same." It is clearly not the same. Saying "We won't give out your location" is in no way the equivalent of saying "We'll only give out your location to people who pay us", in which case you're afforded precisely zero more privacy by this move than you would be if Google had access to the analytics, or do you somehow think that the people buying ads through Apple are in some way favourible to the people buying ads through Google? (The answer, of course, is that they're the same people).

Google is a competitor in a few areas, and in other areas apple has no desire to compete. If allowing google to be the default, but allow for other choices is "foaming at the mouth hatred", then he must really loathe Yahoo for not letting them even be the default.

Apple discovered that analytics data was being used against them, and they were pissed and banned analytics. Then when they re-allowed them, they said that it can be with a direct competitor. Which makes sense. A competitor's phone division if they have analytics, probably has first crack, and might have more access to that data then the rest of the world ever gets a chance too. So they want the analytics forms to be independent so that if data is made available everyone can get the same data, and they can get it at the same time. That makes sense.

And while Apple may not be as generous with the data they collect, they are not collecting data from their competitors handsets. Unless of course I missed the announcement about the iAd API for android?

So, a corollary:
1) Apple has a majority of the market share in smart phone app sales. Good for them.
2) Apple uses its majority market share in smart phone app sales to force everyone into their mobile ad platform. Monopolistic behavior, bad for the economy.

Well the point is it's not just Apple vs Google, it's Apple vs Everyone Who Has An Interest In Advertising/Developing on/Using the Platform. If I'm writing an app and my users say "We don't like Google's data collection policies", I could previously respond to that by serving my ads through a more transparent or less data collection intensive ad company. With these changes in effect, I can only serve my ads through Apple and I and my users are totally at their whim as to whether they play nice or not.

This is about whether [Company B] is leveraging their huge advantage in the Apps space to try and drive out [Company A]'s product, though. If they are, we call that "anti-competitive behaviour" and it's generally frowned upon because it goes against the principles of a free market. That's a whole world of difference to [Company B] made a better product than [Company A] who now feel threatened they will be outsold.

Oh, developers and advertisers will be allowed to know all that. They'll just have to wait for the brouhaha to die down so Apple can quietly introduce their spiffy "new" advertising service. Then they'll pay Apple, not the people who first developed the technology for the platform.

It's possible, maybe even likely, that Apple will bury the costs of the Apple branded service where it won't show. Then they'll piously tell the credulous world that they're giving away free service out of the goodness of their hearts. Sound familiar? It should.

This will be the Stacker case all over again. The platform owner is happy to let vendors make a little money if it sells the platform, but if somebody makes a little too much money, the platform owner forces the vendor to sell out on its terms or pay the consequences. It's worse because in the Stacker case you *could* continue to use Stacker on Windows if you liked it better. Many did that. But Microsoft shrunk the market for Stacker's product sufficiently that Stacker was no longer a viable business.

Apple is simply kicking Admob off the iPhone. None of its high minded justifications of user experience and malware protection apply here. *Apple* wanted to by Admob but failed, so obviously they don't think this is something that shouldn't be on their platform. Failing to buy the company themselves, now they want to stick their thumb in the eye of Admob's new owners.

And why not? Developers aren't going to be porting their Objective C apps to Android overnight. Users still have their apps -- they may even get fewer ads until Apple has replaced Admob. That's not sustainable, but since third parties can't provide advertising revenues to developers, Apple is surely going to create its own version of Admob.

In effect, Apple gets to take over revenues from the business Admob created without buying the business itself. How sweet is that?

This is what I've said all long about Apple's TOS. It really amounts to your committing to a Hobson's choice to any future changes Apple dictates: either eat them or close up shop. For the vast majority of small and even semi-hobbyist developers, this is an acceptable deal because you're only talking about making small amounts of money. But you'd be nuts as an entrepreneur to spend years creating the next big thing on the iPhone platform. Admob's backers got under the wire, but the next entrepreneur who sells his business will have to discount the value of that business by the probability of drawing Apple's displeasure.

So, it seems like it is only your own limitations, not the device's, that is making you BELIEVE that you are "stuck" with iOS on your iPhone (assuming you had one).

Your own limitations AND the license agreement you agreed to when you got an iPhone. I assume that as far as Apple is concerned, wiping the device and installing your own OS is just as illegal as jailbreaking. Apple made sure to get jailbreaking considered illegal under the DMCA because you are 'circumventing protection software'.

You can't have a monopoly on your own store. That as ridiculous as whining that [insert random store of any kind] won't stock your product and whining that it's using it's "monopoly" to strangle you out of their stores. Such an argument has no merit and would be thrown out as ridiculous. No store is obligated to stock your product.

If you just purchased this company for $750 million expecting it too tap into a $600 million a year revenue stream, expecting to go into the billions subsequent years. All of a sudden a competing company deliberately closed the potency of that market, I would be pretty upset (kind of like some punk letting the tyres down on your brand new car)

If Google can prove that it was deliberate they could win. All I'm saying is that Google is really like everyone else, they aren't angels that "do no evil" and for Apple the chain reaction would be very bad for Apple, it wouldn't be just one loss but many thereafter.